IN AMBUSH AT THE LAKE-SIDE
It is spring--such spring as is vouchsafed to the high latitudes, and
I am in my night ambush, prepared to welcome any living thing that is
good enough to come forth from its sanctuary within reeds or forest,
and to parade itself in the open for my inspection. My ambush is a
pine-branch tent, or _shalashka_, the little edifice which has
been my refuge and centre of observation for many a cold northern
night--spring-time nights, indeed, but nights of more degrees of frost
than the sportsman or naturalist of temperate Britain has dreamed of
in his coldest excursions into the realms of imagination. My tent on
this occasion is not pitched upon one of those open spaces in
mid-forest, whereon the blackcock love to hold their nocturnal or
early-matutinal tournaments, where the laughing willow-grouse--that
faithful lover--sports with his pretty white mate, and the dark forest
trees form a romantic background to the proceedings of both. To-night
I am placed in the midst of the marshy approach to a wide sheet of
water--an annex, in fact, to the great Lake Ladoga. Fifty yards or
more in front of me the waters, but lately released from their entire
subjection to the yoke of winter, may be heard softly lapping the
shore in a series of gentle kisses, stolen in the darkness; for it is
but three in the morning--if that, and I can see nothing but the broad
wing of Night still stretched over land and lake. On either side of
the _shalashka_ there extends, I believe, a spur of moorland; behind
is the forest: never far away in a Russian landscape.
I am still in the dreamy, semi-conscious condition superinduced by the
long ride through gloom and silence which has intervened between
supper last evening, twenty miles away, and my arrival here. The
little ponies to whom we are indebted for our conveyance in perfect
safety, through darkness which even the marvellous eyes of a Finn pony
could hardly have penetrated, are some little way off behind us,
hidden among the pine trees, waiting with the philosophic content of
their tribe until it shall have pleased us to accomplish the object of
our nightly pilgrimage and return to them.
The Finn pony, good, faithful soul, accepts everything at his master's
hands with unquestioning docility and good temper; he is never
surprised or annoyed; never taken aback by an obstacle in his way, but
rather sets himself to seek out the best means to circumvent such
obstacle. If his master happens to be drunk or asleep, this is a
matter of supreme indifference to the little animal between the shafts
of the inebriate's cart or beneath his saddle, for he is perfectly
able and ready to manage the whole business of getting himself and his
master safely home, without the slightest interference from the
latter. One of the canniest and best of animals, one of the handiest
of the servants of mankind and the most faithful and reliable of his
friends, is the Finn pony; and I am glad indeed to be able to put this
fact forward, and thus do a good turn for a little-known hero among
those who are not personally acquainted with his claims to that title.
Asleep at my side is Ivan, and Ivan is--I am delighted to say--too
tired or too considerate to snore; I do not care which it is so long
as he does not play his usual nocturnal tunes and spoil this dreamy
unreality in which I am steeped. I am here to take notes; but what
notes can a man take when, not only is there nothing to be seen, and
nothing to be heard--save the gentle plash of the lake, but when he is
not even convinced of the fact that he is himself, or at all events
that he is awake and not dreaming? Such is my condition at present.
Everything seems far, far away. My old self, my own history, even the
point of time, three hours ago by the things we used to call watches,
when I left the lodge and started upon my long, dark, silent
ride--seems to be separated from me by an eternity of space and
tranquil, incidentless existence. What shall I do to pass away the
next hour or two? Sleep? Heaven forbid--the stillness is too good for
that! Review my past? Heaven forbid again--nothing half so unpleasant!
Whatever I do must be done in consciousness and must be connected with
the immediate present or the future; no ghostly past shall be admitted
into the sanctity of these hours. I shall recline and watch the dark
plumage of night, and listen to her soft sounds of peace, and
satisfaction, and maternity, as she broods over her nest and her
little ones, until the hunter Day shall come and chase her from it,
and drive her far away over the sea to her sanctuary beyond the
eastern gates of the world.
And, first, what a marvellous thing is this darkness! Far away at
home, in bed in one's own room, the darkness is nothing; because the
bearings of each object in the chamber are known to you whether in
light or darkness. You can, if you please, sit up in bed and point
with the hand and say: "There is the window, and there the door, and
there the wardrobe," and so on. But here, where I lie and stare out
into the blackness, I can determine nothing of the million animate or
inanimate objects around me; I may people the darkness with what
beings I please until the light arrives; it is an area in which
imagination may disport itself freely and there is none can contradict
its tales, for who knows what bantlings may not be concealed here
beneath the shelter of Mother Night's extended wings? How do I know
that a company of elves are not disporting themselves within a yard or
two of my tent--as ignorant of my proximity as I am of theirs? How can
I tell that some dreadful wild beast is not, at this instant, feeling
his way down to the waters of the lake, in order to allay his thirst
after having feasted upon our poor ponies, behind there in the wood? I
can imagine an interview between a ferocious bear or two gaunt wolves
and our faithful little quadrupeds, whose one idea in life is to do
their duty and eat the breakfast, each day, that the gods provide. I
can see the wolves arrive and find the ponies, and say:
"Good evening, my friends; we regret to say you are required for our
supper."
"That's impossible," the ponies reply; "we are needed to carry our
masters home to Dubrofka."
"Oh, _that's_ all right," say those wolves, to whom a lie is an
unconsidered trifle; "your masters sent us on to tell you it was all
arranged!" Whereupon the ponies believe the tale and are ready to be
eaten, because it is part of the day's work as ordained by their
master, which is another way of spelling God in their language.
I think I know pretty well, however, what I should see, or some of the
things I should see, if an electric light were suddenly switched on
and illuminated the ground around my tent. Close at hand, here, on the
shingly sand at the edge of the lake, there are seven or eight or more
little grey and white sandpipers, fast asleep--perhaps standing on one
leg apiece--among the stones, which are so like them in tint that it
is difficult to distinguish the one from the other, even by daylight.
Then, somewhere within eye-shot, though maybe half a mile off, there
is a flock of cranes standing, like a body of sentinels met to compare
notes, or relieve guard, also probably employing but one leg each to
balance themselves upon during the hours of repose. I wonder whether
they use a different leg on alternate nights, or whether the same one
is told off for night duty each time? If so, it is very hard indeed
for the one limb thus employed to receive no share of the repose
enjoyed by the rest of the body, but to be obliged to toil on night
after night, and day after day, while its lazy fellow-limb gets all
the rest and only half the work. But such is life. I am sure there are
cranes near, for I heard their outposts give the alarm when we
splashed through the marshy approach to this spot on our arrival here.
Luckily Ivan knew the password, which was the grunt of an elk, as
which animals--in search of a drink--we were permitted to come within
the precincts of craneland without alarming the big grey birds to the
departure point. In a very short time we shall hear them going through
the business of waking up, and complaining of the hardship involved in
keeping early hours. Then again, there are ducks, numbers of them, I
feel sure of it, though not one of them has yet uttered a sound,
because this place is a paradise for ducks, and Mother Night covers
many a fond couple of them--paired by this time, and tasting the
sweets of love and the lovely anticipations of nest-time and
prospective flappers. Perhaps there is a pretty pair of tiny painted
teal within a biscuit toss, little lovers nestling in a ridge of the
coarse moorland, or amid the yellow grass which waves all around me,
though I cannot see a blade. Perhaps they woke up when we came
tramping by, and peered with long glossy neck outstretched, and beady
eyes straining to pierce the gloom, on the very point of rising and
disappearing together into the sanctuary of the darkness, but quieted
down when we entered our _shalashka_, and ceased to approach their
nestling place. Or a pair of snipe, or a ruff and a reeve, the
former, at this season, a thing of exquisite beauty by reason of the
Elizabethan ruff which gives him his name. Each male member of his
family is furnished with one of these, and not one is like another in
hue, though all are beautiful. They are of every conceivable tint and
variety, and certainly metamorphose the bird completely, giving him
the handsomest possible appearance so long as they last; but alas!
when the courting days are over, and the fair one has capitulated to
the beautiful besieging party,--presto!--his principal beauty exists
no more, and he becomes without his noble collar, the dullest and
least interesting of birds. Hard on the hen bird, I call it, and
savouring of unfairness. How would Angelina like it were Edwin--the
luxuriance or rakishness of whose moustaches or beard had been
instrumental in captivating her affections--were Edwin, I say, to
shave off those appendages so soon as her fond heart was fairly his
own? If Angelina threw him over, under the circumstances, I am sure no
one could blame her. But if the darkness is mysterious and wonderful,
and full of subtle, hidden potentialities, what shall we say of the
marvellous silence? The repose of it is almost _too_ great. I feel at
every instant as though something or somebody _must_ suddenly break
out into sound. Either the heavens themselves must--this moment or the
next--burst forth into a great, grand chorus of divine music, or a
bird must sing, or a beast roar. There is something in the air which
_must_ out; any sound would do, but a loud hymn would be the most
satisfying at this instant. What a silence it is! The tension is
oppressive when you come to listen to it, yet, if you were in the
humour, how you could lean your very soul against it, and rest--and
rest! But to-night I must have sound soon--my nerves demand it--I
cannot bear this hush much longer; if no wolf howls within the next
few minutes or no crane gives tongue, if no sandpiper whistles or duck
quacks, I must wake Ivan and bid him talk. I am outside the beat of
the willow-grouse, else he would have broken the oppressive spell an
hour ago. Oh, for a chord of music! Oh, to hear on organ swell out,
but for a moment, and then die away again; or to listen, close at
hand, to the soul-deep song of the nightingale! Something is going to
sound forth in a moment; I feel it--now--now! there!... I knew it must
come just then, I had a presentiment of it. It is a snipe high up in
the air, tracing his embroidery upon the sky-line overhead, and
swooping at intervals with a sound as of a sheep's "baa;" this is the
male snipe's curious way of wooing his mate; the "baa" comes dropping
upon the ear at intervals of a few seconds. If that snipe had not come
to save my reason I believe I should have shouted like a lunatic the
next minute, which would assuredly have given Ivan a fit.
There goes a night-hawk, flitting by in the darkness like a ghost. Oh,
what a voice! When he gives tongue I wish the silence back again. Go
hence, noisy spirit of night, and hunt your moths elsewhere. No wonder
you can scream loudly with a mouth like that, for when you open it
your head seems to split in two pieces. There will be no more silence
now; the night-jar has murdered sleep. Listen to the sentinel
crane--or is it the boots or the chambermaid of the community
awakening the family? He screams loudly to them, but they answer
drowsily. "Have you not made a mistake in the time?" they are saying.
"It cannot, surely, be time to get up yet?" It is though, Madame
Crane, and you must quickly let down that other leg and see about the
breakfast. In a minute or two there will be such a clamour of
conversation among the crane community that any person within a radius
of five miles will be aware of their presence. I should say that the
cry of the crane is a better traveller than any other sound I have
heard. These birds require a good voice for communicating with one
another during flight, for a large flock will often separate into many
little bands of two or three while on the "march," and the straggling
units must be picked up by nightfall. They must have strayed far away
indeed if they cannot hear when their friends hail them at the full
pitch of the crane-voice!
Now comes another sound. Far away at first, but nearing at each
repetition. A sad, melancholy note, falling at intervals of a second
or two. I have heard it often before, and wondered what it could be. I
have heard it as they who produced it--whoever they might be--passed
at night far above the sleeping city, and have felt a great pity for
the sad wandering spirits flying and wailing through the
darkness--whither? Perhaps they were the souls of the unbaptized, I
have thought, which must wander, according to a Slavonic tradition,
over land and sea for seven years, seeking and entreating to be
baptized.
But Ivan does not allow my thoughts to wander into folk-lore this
night. The cranes have awakened him, and he has heard this last
mysterious sound also. It has excited him. His finger is at his lip,
and he is listening. "What is it, Ivan? Speak!"
"Hush!" says Ivan. "This is what we came for!" (There _was_ a _raison
d'être_ for our presence here; I forgot to mention this circumstance
before.) "It is the geese!"
So this is the wild geese arriving! Then beat, heart, and strain,
eyes, through the darkness, for this is an exciting moment. Not that
there is the remotest chance of a shot at them at present; but it is
enough if they alight close at hand and tarry, breakfasting, until
daylight doth appear. How close the sound seems in the still air, and
yet the birds may be a mile away! I can hear the slow, measured beat
of their great wings as they approach, a solid phalanx, conversing
quietly at short intervals. Surely they are very close indeed? They
are all talking at once now. Perhaps they have seen the water and are
excited, knowing that their journey is at an end. The beating of their
wings seems almost to brush now the topmost boughs of the _shalashka_.
I fancy I can feel a movement in the air, fanned by their big pinions.
Thud! There goes the leader; he has alighted. Thud again--and yet
again! It is true--they are here; they have come!
To judge from the noises which they are making, there must be a
considerable number arrived--thirty or forty. They are chattering to
one another happily and sociably, and uttering very different tones
from those weird, melancholy cries of theirs while on the wing. They
are no longer the lost spirits, the poor wandering unbaptized souls,
but a party of merry travellers just arrived, so to speak, at the
tavern where a comfortable breakfast is spread all ready for them.
They are sure to do justice to it, for this is their favourite
feeding-ground--all over this marsh, so Ivan says. It is growing
lighter. The conglomeration of sounds of life seems to have startled
the Night, and reminded her that she must hurry away and attend to her
duties in another hemisphere. She is gradually withdrawing her soft
wings--those dark and motherly wings which have guarded so well her
little ones for many a long silent hour. Go in peace, Mother Night,
for the broad Sun will take good care of your bantlings during your
absence. He will open upon them his "good gigantic smile," and they
shall laugh and sing and be merry. Already I can catch a pale, sickly
gleam of light, where the Waters look up to the grey sky and cry, "How
long, Sun, how long the gloom and the cold?"
Be silent, lake, for soon the bridegroom will arrive, and you shall
bedeck your waters with gems, and sparkle and glitter in leagues of
dancing delight.
The sandpipers are merry and active, and dart from place to place in
pairs and companies, whistling and rejoicing; they pass, now and
again, so close to me that I can see them, and their whistling seems
to come from the very air within the _shalashka_. And the snipe
overhead, he never tires of his lightning-flight and his wheeling; and
his "baa" is one of the sounds which continues without ceasing. There
is yet another voice--a croak and then a whistle, and the same
repeated farther away, and yet again in the distance: a woodcock, I
believe, but I cannot see him. He is taking his spring-flight,
followed or preceded by his spouse. They will flit across a given
space, then alight and dally awhile in pretty courtship, then return
the way they came; and so again, _da capo_.
What are those tall posts yonder, outlining themselves against the
paling sky? They are motionless, apparently--no, they move, as I stare
through the uncertain light; they shorten, and lengthen, and bend, and
dip, and glide slowly forward and bend again: it is the cranes, I am
sure of it, for the clamour seems to come from that very spot. But
where are the geese? I can hear them but they are still invisible, for
they are feeding head down, and show no outline against the sky.
Listen! another band of melancholy air-wanderers is approaching--how
weird, how pathetic is the sound of their coming! Do they then so hate
the trouble of travelling? or is it merely that they have discovered
which tone and note of the gamut carries furthest through the ether,
and that this happens to be the most doleful of all notes? They are
very close now--stay! What is this? are they not going to alight and
join the happy breakfast-party below there? Apparently not: they are
overhead, they have passed, they have gone on--I can see them; they
are travelling in wedge-like formation, a big triangle of beating
wings that flog the air with measured sound and slow. How deliberate
and yet how swift and powerful is their flight! Why did they not stop
here? Their cry was answered from below, and yet they did not pause
but continued on their course. Why was the invitation to breakfast not
accepted? Who can say what is the etiquette of the wild goose? Perhaps
it was not an invitation, but rather an intimation that this
place--this tavern--was already occupied by a rival community.
One or two of my former friends take wing and join the other party; no
doubt they have some reason for this step, but what that reason is no
man may conjecture. Perhaps they are scouts sent forward to find out
who these new arrivals are; perhaps they have been badly treated here
and have gone over to the enemy in order to "better themselves."
Luckily the bulk of the party remain behind, however; and now, in the
strengthening light, I can plainly see a body of stout grey fellows
waddling about among the yellow grasses and the soaked moss, and
feeding in the well-known manner of geese in any field in far-off
England. Forty yards, I reckon, separates my _shalashka_ from the
nearest goose: one of them may wander nearer--it is worth while to be
patient and to allow the light to intensify before hazarding a shot
which will disperse every living creature within hearing, and end the
delight with which this spring morning is stored.
Slowly the sky, due east, yellows and then reddens; it seems to be
shooting up pink cloudlets, and letting them fly over heaven in order
to herald the uprising of the King of Morning; for the Sun is
coming--there can be no doubt of it! Redder and redder are the clouds
that precede him; now the mists that veil his bed are growing golden
and radiant, and fly right and left as he pushes his head through them
and looks out upon the earth, and smiles in a broad pathway across the
lake. As though by magic a thousand song birds instantly fill the air
with hymns of praise; even the tall cranes cease their gabbling and
gobbling, and look for a moment at the apparition ere they resume the
business of the hour. They are splashing about in shallow water, and
each step they make throws a shower of bright gems around them. The
geese--hungry no doubt after a long journey, and being naturally
rather of a practical than of a romantic turn of mind, take but little
notice of the Sun-god; he's all right, they think, and is sure to turn
up at daybreak every morning, surely one need not interrupt one's
breakfast to look up at him? The pace is too good! Look at the
ducks--here a pair and there a pair--swimming out into the shining
water, dipping their heads as they go and sending diamond-baths over
the sheen of their necks and shoulders. They pursue one another, and
quack and court, and bathe, and are perfectly and entirely happy and
content, as who would not be in their place? A curlew sails by,
calling to its mate, who is circling over the lake further to the
left. And all the while the busy little company of sandpipers flit and
whistle, and alight and run, and are off again on the wing--life is
all movement and 'go' for them; they cannot be still.
There is an osprey! He is floating motionless in air, high over the
lake. He, too, is thinking of breakfast. Soon he will drop like a bolt
from heaven, disappear entirely or partially in the wave, and in a
moment reappear with his meal safely held in those business-like
talons of his. There he goes--splash! he has missed his mark. A cry of
rage, and a circle or two over the water, and he is aloft
again--hanging like an impending doom over the bright lake. He will
not miss again! But Ivan is touching my arm: I know what he means: he
means that I must blot out this picture of peace and life by sending a
message of grim death and noisy ruin into the very midst of it. Let me
wait awhile, Ivan, and watch. It is so little for you who live amid
all this and can see it at any time; but it is so much to me--a
dweller in towns, where there is no free, happy nature-life to watch
and feast upon, and no daybreak save that of the London cat and the
strident, brazen cock. Give me another hour of it, Ivan? No? Well,
half an hour? But Ivan says "No;" the geese may depart at any moment,
he whispers; shoot while you can! I have no doubt Ivan made a mental
addition, "and don't be a sentimental English idiot;" but the former
words were all I was permitted to hear. So there is nothing for it: I
must shoot; I must, with my own hand, blot out all this beauty, and
smudge the picture which Morning has painted for my delight--and all
to see a grey goose flutter and die who is now so busy and happy! The
game is not worth the candle; but it must be done! One shot as they
stand, says pitiless Ivan, and another as they rise--unless I prefer
to hazard a cartridge after one of yonder cranes. Crane me no cranes:
it is goose or nothing; give me the gun, Ivan!
There! the deed is done, for good or for evil. The goose who stood to
receive my shot lived on, and I trust still lives; his feathers are
thick and tough, and I hope in mercy that if he is hit at all his
plumage has turned aside or suffocated the shot, and that he is not
much hurt. He is gone, anyhow, flying strongly. The goose which rose
to receive fire will rise no more. He is dead; he will utter never
more his sad pilgrim-notes; he will feed no more in these pleasant
pastures. Go and pick him up, Ivan, and he shall be cooked and
tentatively eaten, and perhaps pronounced very nice, and perhaps
condemned as very nasty.
Now turn and see what we have done. The last crane has taken
wing--running a few yards and jumping clumsily into the air, rather
like a cyclist mounting his machine. He will fly a hundred yards
before those long legs of his are comfortably stowed away! What a slow
flight it seems, yet it carries him wonderfully far away from us in a
short time!
And the ducks? Gone also; circling high in air, taking stock of us.
When they have made up their minds that we are bad characters and not
to be trusted, they will head for a distant point and disappear. The
curlew is far away, so is the osprey; the sandpipers are still in the
neighbourhood, they are too inquisitive to go far from us; they must
needs watch us and find out all about us first. And away there in the
bright distance floats, receding, the triangle of geese--one less than
it came, and one, perhaps, in pain and suffering, though Heaven forbid
that this should be so.
All this we have done, friend Ivan, with our banging and bloodshed!
See what a transformation scene the act of man works, in an instant,
upon a lovely landscape? Of life he makes death; of busy, happy
places, full of colours and of sounds, and of song and of joy, he
makes a barren waste, with himself the sole living creature remaining
to look upon the face of it! Let us go home, Ivan, we shall see no
more of bird-life this morning; take up your poor grey victim and come
along--the place will be the better and the happier for our departure,
and perhaps, after a while, all its evicted tenants, save one, may
return again to their own.
But Ivan only remarks that I ought to have shot that first goose in
the head, and then we should have had two instead of one. Then he
scratches his own head, gazes long and intently over the sparkling
waters of the lake in the direction where the departed geese are now
but a dark smudge in the distant sky, spits on the ground in contempt
of muff-shots and lost opportunities, and strides away towards the
ponies. As we disappear in the forest I look back and see some ducks
returning, and hear the sandpipers whistle us a taunting farewell!
Amen! No one wants us here: they are all happier without us.